No Oak Park school is better named when it comes to kids' reading than Washington Irving, on Cuyler in the village's southeast corner. How can we beat The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, with the school teacher Ichabod Crane scared almost to death by a headless horseman.

Or Rip Van Winkle, asleep for 20 years and waking to find his children grown, his mean old wife dead, and the British no longer in charge in his upstate New York village?

There’s more more more here at the Wednesday Journal of Oak Park and River Forest.

Rev. Michael Pfleger, the politically active leader of St. Sabina Church . . .  gave Obama's campaign $1,500 between 1995 and 2001, including $200 in April 2001, about three months after Obama announced $225,000 in grants to St. Sabina programs.

P. defends himself flimsily:

"At a time when less people vote than ever, I don't think pastors should be silent on politics," Pfleger said.

He wants to say fewer, not less.  I am shocked at that mis-usage more than at the money-passing, but am becoming inured to such violence to the king’s English. 

And to elementary logic.

Didn’t Obama the other day on the Meet Russert show condemn Hillary (remember her?) for promoting a summertime gas-tax moratorium, calling it “a political response . . . “ — pausing, searching, as he does, and me wondering in amazement, he’s going to say “economic” problem? (which it most surely is) — and finally completing his thought: “. . . that we have neglected for decades”!

Does he mean there’s no such thing as a political answer to a longstanding problem?  What does he think the 1965 voting rights law was? 

He’s a whippersnapper who should go back to Columbia or Harvard for remediation.

They loved it.  But he was sanctioning stereotypes, nay justifying them, even glorifying them.  Blacks can’t read?  Do math?  Science?  By their natures?  Whoa.  That’s what some (bad) people have been saying for years.

He seeks to one-up critics by accepting the characterization, glorifying it, using it as excuse — which is dangerous, as no less a spokesman for what’s right and true than Geraldo Rivera said on Fox right after his speech.  Rivera managed to toss out some catchwords that carry his message — lowering of standards, ebonics — but his all-black panel, including talk show host Montel Williams, weren’t buying.

Williams especially went off on a rant about changing school systems (and lowering gas prices).  None of the three picked up on Rivera’s attempt at demurring from Wright’s broadsides vs. schooling as we know it. 

Wright came off as something of an oaf, which I think captures him as well as calling him an anti-American radical.  In any event, the more he has the limelight, the more white voters have to wonder about the Dems’ half-black candidate.  It’s one thing to sit and listen to and be counselled by a radical, another to do that and be done that by a jerk.

"People will fight over a dollar," said Lawrence, 16. "If you're in one gang and you flip to another gang, people fight over that. Or if you even just look at somebody crazy, they'll fight you over that too."

The code calls for fighting (as it has in tough city neighborhoods for decades if not centuries):

 "If somebody wants to fight you, you know you're going to fight," Rudy said. "This happens so often; violence is always there."

And avoiding it carries its own risks.

"If you talk it out, you're a punk . . . someone who always backs down, who doesn't know how to defend themselves," said Nathaniel Hayes, a Clemente 10th grader. "If you're a coward, you're nothing, you're low-class."

How you wear your hat matters:

"If you have a hat cocked to the left, they shoot you. If it's cocked to the right, they shoot you," he said. "You have to keep it straight to the front. You can't even wear it to the back no more."

Don’t try to get away:

"People, they get jealous," said Michael, his voice weary. "They see you trying to go somewhere, trying to get out, and they hate on you. Then they try to fight. It's frustrating. You try to do right, but there's always someone trying to pull you back."

In other words, it’s hopeless.  That’s the story, like it or not.  Nothing anyone can do about it.

The story is good in large part because it just tells it, without apparent slant.  It’s presented as a purely personal issue, life tribal style, without a smidgeon of rationality.  A crazy community.

City health inspectors say they found mouse droppings in the food preparation and storage area at Saint Xavier, 3700 W. 103rd St., on the Southwest Side last month. A follow-up inspection Tuesday found the problem had not been corrected.

A university spokesperson says the facility is being thoroughly cleaned. It is hoped it will reopen in a few days.

Do these academic people, full of love for God’s dumb creatures, feel as Bobby Burns felt and therefore lay out neither traps nor poison?  Are they:

truly sorry Man's dominion
Has broken Nature's social union,
An' justifies that ill opinion,
Which makes thee startle,
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An' fellow-mortal!

More grim details:

[The City’s public health department] initially inspected the dining facility on March 24, in response to a person who called 311 to complain of becoming ill after eating at St. Xavier.  . . . . [I]nspectors found mouse feces, as well as gaps in exit doors---gaps wide enough to allow access to rodents and insects. Dining facility management was ordered to eliminate the infestation and seal the doors. Today’s re-inspection showed that the infestation was not eliminated.

Representatives of the dining facility will have to explain their failure at a City of Chicago administrative hearing set for April 24.

And more:

St. Xavier enrolls 5,678 students, the vast majority of them female. All but 500 live off campus.

They know now, more than ever, that in many senses there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

did not violate any policies in using unattributed quotes in alumni magazine columns last year.

Provost Dan Linzer said that he concurred . . . that Dean John Lavine had accurately captured the essence of student sentiments about courses in his column, "Letter from the Dean." [Italics added]

He used quotation marks, right?  To capture the essence?  Winking as he did so?  The quoted statements

cannot be [verified, but] sufficient material does exist . . . to demonstrate that sentiments similar to the quotes had been expressed by students," . . . .  [Italics added again]

This was pretty truthy stuff?

"The author of a [column] like the "Letter from the Dean" could not reasonably be expected [to] have retained for a year the notes or e-mails documenting the sources of quotations used in the letter."

But The Daily Northwestern asked every student, none of whom vouched for the blind-quote affirmations of the dean’s class:

[Columnist] Spett sought out the 29 students in the class Lavine had described and, he said, asked all of them if they had made the statements in Lavine's story. All said no.

But the dean is not guilty, as it were of a criminal charge, when the matter was much more a civil complaint, of which he’s supposed to be innocent — a regular Caesar’s wife, being a teacher of mass communicators in a prestige-heavy institution.

Are we henceforward to look on Medill grads’ work as crafted so that we can’t pin a thing on the writer?  He’s in the clear, is he?  No matter the “caveat lector” that has to accompany his writing?

The oldest trick in the book in the "news" biz is to take a photo of a politician that makes him look worried, sad, or downcast to offset a story of how things aren't working so well for that pol's policies or plans. Well, the Chicago Sun-Times has used that ages old trick to lambast president Bush's "No Child Left Behind" program by giving us the stories of several Illinois students that supposedly slipped through the cracks of the Federal program and using a picture of Bush with furrowed brow with inset pictures of the several students. Of course, their stories are expectedly filled with nonsense, but it is the photo that the Sun-Times really expects to tell the tale. This photo says "failure and he knows it" all over the thing and sets the tone of bias from the start.

The editorial leans heavily on anecdotal argument, a newspaper staple.  Which is why I often discount newspaper arguments.

As for the law itself, the dreadful situation

won't improve, many in Chicago's trenches say, unless the law is changed to address what stands in the way: inequitable funding, overcrowding, violence, truancy and the overwhelming effects of poverty.

If only the federal govt. would “address” funding, violence, truancy, etc.  And if it would, then what?

The boy was in fourth or fifth grade, the suit says, when Brother Gilbert Hensley sexually abused him on at least four occasions while stationed at the parish, incidents "repressed" by the boy until July 2004.

He wasn't the only boy molested by Brother Hensley, says the suit, which says it was "widely known" in the parish and the Dominicans that Hensley

suffered a broken jaw after trying to molest a 17-year-old who then attacked him.

A priest identified as Hensley's supervisor also was molesting boys, according to the lawsuit.

Hensley has denied the allegations.

Still overdue [after various adjustments] . . . are answers for the reasons behind [for?] the divide. Because even when the number of suspensions declined, the rates remained the same: African-American students were still suspended 3-1 over whites and Hispanics.

"There is something out there that we're missing," admits James Bebley, first deputy general counsel for the Board of Education.

There’s also something that we readers are missing, namely what constituteness unfairness in this matter.  Sheer “disparity,” as Sun-Times says?  Really?  What if black kids misbehave more often? 

Nothing is said about that.  Nor is anything said about racial discrimination in suspending kids, which would be the point, would it not?  If not, why not?

He, a Catholic, had been point man for Rogers’ California operation.  The sisters, the Immaculate Heart of Mary (IHM) nuns, came looking for help.  Rogers had created non-directive counselling, in which the “client” (his term) knew best and the counsellor was simply to help him become his real self and “go with the flow,” as TV’s Bob Newhart had his feckless, comic psychologist clients do in the ‘70s in The Bob Newhart Show.

Coulson, interviewed by Dr. Wm. Marra, made a clean breast of it, offering a grimly fascinating account of crazy thinking gone especially wild in the fields of the Lord.  The IHM sisters found themselves, and it wasn’t the ones who had vowed poverty, etc. and united in community.  The congregation evaporated under the strain of group encounter sessions led by Rogers, Coulson, and the rest.

The problem was, they didn’t count on evil.  Their counterpart Abraham Maslow, also in the self-realization business, discovered it, however, and warned them.  “Maslow believed in evil, and we didn't.  He said our problem was our total confusion about evil.”

He said, there was “danger in our thinking and acting as if there were no paranoids or psychopaths or SOBs in the world to mess things up.”  Too late, however, not until 1979, by which time the damage was done, said Coulson.

Rogers, a good man, wasn’t the problem; his confusion was. 

As long as Rogers and those who feared Rogers' judgement were present it was okay, because nobody fooled around in the presence of Carl Rogers.  He kept people in line;  he was a moral force.  People did, in fact, consult their consciences, and it looked like good things were happening.

Among other bad things was the incursion of their process into Catholic schools, from which Coulson and his wife pulled their kids while he was still a Rogerian.  Her “common sense” decided the matter.  [Thank God for wives with common sense.]

Catholics in general had “one wretched line” from a Vatican 2 document, cited by Marra, that in its broad sweep and indeterminacy open the way to nonsense: "As they advance in years, children should be given a positive and prudent education in sexuality."

It did not say Catholics school needed “school-based” sex education, said Marra.  But it paved the way nonetheless, he said.

People went on to teach “children that they can make wrong right by choosing it, as long as they are sincere in their choice,” said Coulson, who is extremely leery of the whole National Catholic Education Association, advising people to stay away from its conferences.  At these conferences, he said,

[Y]ou get the impression that people are on the make. They see themselves now as "whole persons," and they justify their sexualized behavior on the basis
of that theory. It was better when we were more repressed.

As for Rogers and his effect on schools in general, “The basic message is that education, classroom education, is a variant on group psychotherapy.”  [Some years back, hearing a junior-high principal report glowingly on her school during a referendum campaign in Oak Park, I thought and wrote that hers was clearly a therapeutic model.  How the kids felt was everything.]

As for the Catholic scene:

[T]his helps account for a lot of what goes on in Catholic youth
retreats these days, and Catholic sex education, where the kids sit in
circles, and talk about their feelings.  They explore what Rogers honestly
characterized as increasingly dangerous feelings.

On the other hand, there is the examined life, promoted by Aristotle and not least of all by the Catholic Church:

[T]his examination of conscience is done with a constant reference to what we know is right. It is not something yet to be invented, but something that has been known for almost 2,000 years. The examination is guided by what I call Catholic equipment. The list that I used to consult as a young Catholic in the '50s told me in advance what I should be looking for. I knew venial and mortal sins inside and out, not because I had discovered this knowledge within my own experience, but because it was provided for me by the Church, which had my best interests at heart. [Italics added]

Not because I had discovered this knowledge within my own experience, but because it was provided for me by the Church.  He was not required to find it.  What do you know about that!

Thanks to the spiritual revival I helped usher in, DePaul just hired two very prominent Catholic scholars for the Catholic Studies program. 

What’s more, he has “heard rumors” that “more money has been allocated for yet another Catholic Studies hire search.”

Sounds good, even if “Catholic Studies” at a Catholic institution seems on its face redundant, at least in the humanities.

On the other hand, such a program can offer a meaty alternative for the Catholicism-interested, and the two hires seem up to that challenge.

One of them, Peter Casarella, headed a Center for Medieval and Byzantine Studies at Catholic U. and has written about

medieval Christian Neo-Platonism, contemporary theological aesthetics. St. Bonaventure’s Trinitarian theology of creation, the idea of emergence in contemporary physics and the Hispanic/Latino presence in the U.S. Catholic Church.

Is that meaty enough for you?

The other new man, Farrell O’Gorman, is a Flannery O’Connor specialist with a “critically recognized” novel to his credit, “Awaiting Orders” (Idylls Press, 2006). 

The America Mag reviewer said O’G “is trying to explore how a Christian message of hope and redemption can attain credibility,” which is a far cry from fiction readers are used to these days.

For what it’s worth, his doctorate is from N. Carolina-Chapel Hill, Casarella’s is from Yale.  O’Gorman comes from the Mississippi State U. English department.

Miscamble’s “The Faculty ‘Problem’: How can Catholic identity be preserved?” (Subscription only) ran in the 9/10 America.

If this be lay-edited Commonweal vs. Jesuit-edited America, let us all make the most of it.

For a man who has just lost his job after a highly public battle, DePaul University assistant political science Professor Norman Finkelstein is calm and accepting.

That's because Finkelstein, whose tenure bid drew widespread interest because of the Jewish professor's blunt criticism of Jews and the state of Israel -- and the attack on those views waged by Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz -- stands firmly on the beliefs that may have got him fired.

Let us now praise noble men who stand firmly on their beliefs, for one thing.  But let us not give an iota of attention to tenure standards.  For another, denial of tenure is not a firing, as the lede implies, though it is a year’s notice.

For yet another, let us lay it on thick as a personality piece that is blatantly complimentary to a prof who has been denied tenure elsewhere, as we read in Chi Trib.  Thick?  Consider the 3rd and 4th ‘grafs:

"There is a song by the folk singer Keith Seeger, 'Die Gedanken sind frei,'" the controversial academic reflected in a rare interview with the Sun-Times.

"That means, 'thoughts are free.' No one can deny that 'die gedanken sind frei.' They can deny me tenure, deny me the right to teach. But they will never stop me from saying what I believe."

Etc. etc., violin chords in the background.

In Chi Trib, on the other hand, we hear both sides, including this:

Before coming to DePaul, Finkelstein taught at several New York universities but was not granted tenure. At DePaul, his application for tenure was supported by the political science department but opposed by Dean Chuck Suchar of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, who said he found Finkelstein's attack-style scholarship inconsistent with the university's commitment to respect for the views of all. [Italics added]

Attack-style scholarship, eh?  So there is a bigger question here, or at least more pertinent to the story, than one man sticking to his guns, which is a generic issue?  In any case, that’s what the dean did, right?